Ten Novels and Their Authors Page 10

  In the autumn the party went back to Milan. For the sake of her reputation, she insisted on Stendhal’s taking rooms in an obscure suburb. When she gave him an assignation, he went, disguised, in the dead of night, throwing spies off the scent by changing carriage several times, and then was admitted to the apartment by a chambermaid. But the chambermaid, having quarrelled with her mistress or won over by the money of Beyle, made on a sudden the startling revelation that Madame’s husband was not jealous at all; she demanded all this mystery to prevent Monsieur Beyle from encountering a rival, several rivals, for there were many, and the maid offered to prove it to him. Next day she hid him in a small closet beside Gina’s boudoir, and there he saw with his own eyes, through a hole in the wall, the treachery that was being done him, only three feet from his hiding place. ‘You may think perhaps,’ said Beyle, when relating the incident to Mérimée years afterward, ‘that I rushed out of the closet in order to poniard the two of them? Not at all … I left my dark closet as quietly as I went in, thinking only of the ridiculous side of the adventure, laughing to myself, and also full of scorn for the lady, and quite happy, after all, to have regained my liberty.’

  But he was deeply mortified. He claims that for eighteen months he was unable to write, to think or to speak. Gina tried to win him back. One day she waylaid him at the Brera, the great picture gallery, and going down on her knees begged him to forgive her. ‘I had the ridiculous pride,’ he told Mérimée, ‘to repulse her with disdain. I seem still to see her pursuing me, clinging to my coat tails and dragging herself on her knees the length of the great gallery. I was a fool not to forgive her, for certainly she never loved me so much as on that day.’

  In 1818, however, Stendhal met the beautiful Countess Dembrowski, and promptly fell in love with her. He was thirty-six and she ten years younger. This was the first time he had set his affections on a woman of distinction. The Countess, an Italian, was married in her teens to a Polish general, but had left him after some years and gone to Switzerland with her two children. The poet, Ugo Foscolo, was living there in exile, and public opinion wrongly believed that it was to live with him that she had left her husband. When she returned to Milan, she was under a cloud, not because she had had a lover, which, according to the manners of the time, was far from reprehensible, but because she had left her husband and lived by herself abroad. It was not till after five months of passionate admiration that Stendhal ventured to declare his love. She promptly showed him the door. He wrote humbly apologising, and eventually she so far relented as to allow him to come to see her once a fortnight. She made it very obvious that his attentions were distasteful to her, but he persisted. One of the odd things about Stendhal is that though he was always on the watch lest anyone made a fool of him, he was constantly making a fool of himself. On one occasion the Countess went to Volterra to see her two sons, who were at school there, and Stendhal followed her; but, knowing it would anger her, disguised himself by wearing green spectacles. He took them off in the evening when he went for a stroll, and by chance met the Countess. She cut him dead and next day sent him a note ‘berating him for having followed her to Volterra and compromised her by hanging about the park where she walked every day’. He answered, beseeching her to pardon him and a day or two later called on her. She sent him coldly away. He went to Florence and bombarded her with unhappy letters. She sent them back to him unopened, and wrote as follows: ‘Monsieur, I do not wish to receive any more letters from you and will not write to you. I am with perfect esteem, etc.…’

  Stendhal, disconsolate, returned to Milan, only to learn that his father had died. He started at once for Grenoble. There he found that the attorney’s affairs were in a bad way, and instead of inheriting the fortune he expected, he was left with little but debts to settle. He hurried back to Milan, and somehow, we are not told how, managed to persuade the Countess to let him once more see her again at stated intervals; but such was his vanity, he would not believe that she was perfectly indifferent to him, and later he wrote: ‘After three years of intimacy, I left a woman whom I loved and who loved me, and yet who never gave herself to me.’

  In 1821, on account of his relations with certain Italian patriots, the Austrian police requested him to leave Milan. He settled down in Paris and for the next nine years mostly lived there. He frequented the salons where wit was appreciated. He was no longer tongue-tied, but was become an amusing, caustic talker, at his best with eight or ten persons whom he liked; but, as many good talkers do, he was inclined to monopolise the conversation. He liked to lay down the law, and took no pains to conceal his contempt for anyone who did not agree with him. In his desire to shock, he indulged somewhat freely in the bawdy and the profane, and carping critics thought that, to entertain or to provoke, he often forced his humour. He could not suffer bores, and found it hard to believe that they were not scoundrels as well.

  During this period he had the only love affair in which his love appears to have been requited. The Countess de Curial, née Clémentine Bougeot, was separated from an unfaithful, but jealous and irascible, husband. She was a handsome woman of thirty-six and Stendhal was over forty, a fat short man with a fat red nose, an enormous paunch and a huge behind. He wore a reddish-brown wig and great whiskers dyed to match. He dressed as grandly as his limited means allowed. Clémentine de Curial was attracted by Stendhal’s wit and good humour, and when after a proper interval he ‘attacked’, she received his proposals with the gratitude proper to her age. During the two years the affair lasted she wrote him two hundred and fifteen letters. It was all as romantic as Stendhal could have wished. Fearing her husband’s rage, he would pay her secret visits. I quote from Matthew Josephson: ‘He would assume a disguise, would take a carriage from Paris and, in darkness, ride full tilt to her château, where he would arrive after midnight. And Madame de Curial proved herself as audacious as any heroine of a novel by Stendhal. Once, when unexpected guests arrived – perhaps her husband – interrupting their assignation, she hurriedly led him down to the cellar, removed the ladder by which he descended, and shut the trap door. There in a dark, romantic cavern the enraptured Stendhal remained for three whole days imprisoned, nay entombed, while the madly-devoted Clémentine prepared food for him, lowered and raised the ladder so that she might come to him secretly, and even, in order to provide for his wants, brought down and then emptied the close stool.’ ‘She was sublime,’ Stendhal wrote afterwards, ‘when she came to the cellar at night.’ But presently quarrels arose between the lovers which were as tempestuous as their passion, and eventually the lady threw Stendhal over for another, and perhaps less exacting or more exciting, lover.

  Then came the revolution of 1830. Charles X went into exile, and Louis Philippe ascended the throne. Stendhal had, by this time, spent the little he had been able to save from his father’s ruin, and his literary efforts, for he had reverted to his old ambition to become a famous writer, brought him neither money nor reputation. Del l’Amour was published in 1822, and in eleven years only seventeen copies were sold. Armance, in 1827, succeeded neither with the critics nor the public. He had, as I have mentioned, tried in vain to get some government post, and at last, with the change of régime, he was appointed to the consulate at Trieste; but, owing to his liberal sympathies, the Austrian authorities refused to accept him, and he was transferred to Civita Vecchia in the Papal States.

  He took his official duties lightly; he was a tireless sightseer and, whenever possible, went on a jaunt. He found in Rome friends who made much of him. But notwithstanding these distractions, he was hideously bored, and lonely; and, at the age of fifty-one, he made an offer of marriage to a young girl, the daughter of his laundress and of a minor employee at the consulate. To his mortification, the offer was refused, not, as one might have expected, because of his age and bad character, but because of his liberal opinions. In 1836 he persuaded his Minister to give him some small job that allowed him to live in Paris for three years, while someone else temporarily occup
ied his post. He was by then fatter than ever, and apoplectic, but this did not prevent him from dressing in the height of fashion, and a slighting remark on the cut of his coat or the style of his trousers deeply affronted him. He continued to make love, but with little success. He persuaded himself that he was still in love with Clémentine de Curial, and sought to resume some sort of relations with her. Ten years had passed since the break, and she very sensibly replied that one cannot light an extinct fire with embers. She told him that he must be content to be her first and best friend. Mérimée relates that he was shattered by the blow: ‘He could not pronounce her name without his voice changing … It was the only time I had seen him weep.’ But he seems to have recovered sufficiently within a month or two unsuccessfully to make advances to a certain Madame Gaulthier. At length, he was obliged to return to Civita Vecchia and there, two years later, he had a stroke. On his recovery he asked for leave of absence to consult a famous doctor at Geneva. He moved from there to Paris and resumed his old life. He went to parties and talked with undiminished vivacity. One day in March, 1842, he attended an official dinner at the Ministry of Foreign Affairs and that evening, while walking along the boulevard, had a second stroke. He was carried to his lodging and died next day. He had passed his life in the pursuit of happiness, and had never learnt that happiness is best attained when it is not sought; and, moreover, is only known when it is lost. It is doubtful whether anyone can say ‘I am happy’; but only ‘I was happy’. For happiness is not well-being, content, heart’s ease, pleasure, enjoyment: all these go to make happiness, but they are not happiness.

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  Stendhal was an eccentric. His character was even more incongruous than that of most men, and one is amazed that so many contradictory traits should co-exist in one and the same person. They do not form a harmony that is in any way plausible. He had great virtues and great defects. He was sensitive, emotional, diffident, talented, a hard worker when there was work to be done, cool and brave in danger, a good friend and of a remarkable originality. His prejudices were absurd, his aims unworthy. He was distrustful (and so an easy dupe), intolerant, uncharitable, none too conscientious, fatuously vain and vainglorious, sensual without delicacy, and licentious without passion. But if we know that he had these defects, it is because he has told us so himself. Stendhal was not a professional author, he was hardly even a man of letters, but he wrote incessantly, and he wrote almost entirely about himself. For years he kept a journal, of which great sections have come down to us, and it is plain that he wrote with no view to publication; but in his early fifties he wrote an autobiography in five hundred pages, which carried him to the age of seventeen, and this, though left unrevised at his death, he meant to be read. In it he sometimes makes himself out more important than he really was, and claims to have done things he did not do, but on the whole it is truthful. He does not spare himself, and I imagine that few can read these books, and they are not easy to read, since they are in parts dull and often repetitive, without asking themselves whether, if they were unwise enough to expose themselves with so much frankness, they would make a much better showing.

  When Stendhal died, only two Paris papers troubled to report the fact, and only three persons, of whom Mérimée was one, attended his funeral. It looked as though he would be entirely forgotten; and, indeed, he might well have been but for the efforts of two devoted friends who succeeded in persuading an important firm of publishers to issue an edition of his principal works. The public, however, notwithstanding two articles which the powerful critic, Sainte-Beuve, devoted to them, remained indifferent. That is not surprising, since Sainte-Beuve’s first article was concerned with Stendhal’s early works, which his contemporaries neglected and which posterity has decided to ignore, and in the second article he reserved his praise for Stendhal’s books of travel, Promenades dans Rome and Mémoires d’un Touriste, and found nothing to his liking in the novels. He claimed that the characters were puppets, ingeniously constructed, but whose every movement revealed the mechanism within; and the incidents he condemned as frankly incredible. Balzac, while Stendhal was still alive, had written a laudatory article on La Chartreuse de Parme; Sainte-Beuve wrote: ‘It is evident that I am far from sharing the enthusiasm of M. de Balzac for La Chartreuse de Parme. The simple fact is that he has written of Beyle, as a novelist, as he would have liked people to write of himself’; and then, a little later, rather maliciously, he tells how after Stendhal’s death among his papers was found one which showed that he had given or lent Balzac three thousand francs (and with Balzac a loan always was a gift), and thus paid for the eulogy. Upon this Sainte-Beuve quoted: ‘Ce mélange de gloire et de gain m’importune.’ Perhaps he needn’t have been so censorious: his two articles on Stendhal were paid for by the publishers of the edition, and the two articles he wrote on Stendhal’s cousin, Pierre Daru, whose only distinction as a writer was that he had translated Horace and written a history of Venice in nine volumes, were commissioned as an act of piety by the family.

  Stendhal never doubted that his works would survive, but he was prepared to wait till 1880, or even to 1900, to receive the appreciation that was his due. Many an author has consoled himself for the neglect of his contemporaries by a confidence that posterity will recognise his merits. It seldom does. Posterity is busy and careless and, when it concerns itself with the literary productions of the past, makes its choice among those that were successful in their own day. It is only by a remote chance that a dead author is rescued from the obscurity in which he languished during his lifetime. In the case of Stendhal, a professor, otherwise unknown, in his lectures at the École Normale enthusiastically praised his books, and there happened to be among his students some clever young men who later made a name for themselves. They read them, and finding in them something that suited the climate of opinion at the time prevalent among the young, became fanatical admirers. The ablest of these young men was Hippolyte Taine, and many years later, by which time he was become a well-known and influential man of letters, he wrote a long essay in which he called attention especially to Stendhal’s psychological insight. In passing, I should remark that when literary critics speak of a novelist’s psychology, they do not use the term in quite the sense that psychologists use it. So far as I can make out, what they mean is that the novelist lays a greater emphasis on the motives, thoughts and emotions of his characters than on their actions; but in practice this results in the novelist chiefly displaying the more sinister parts of man’s nature, his envy, his malignity, his selfishness, his pettiness – in fact, his baser rather than his better nature; and this has an air of truth, for, unless we are pect fools, we are well aware how much there is in us all that is hateful. ‘But for the grace of God there goes John Bradford.’ Since Taine’s essay, an immense amount has been written about Stendhal, and it is generally agreed that he is one of the three great novelists that France produced in the nineteenth century.

  His case is a very singular one. Most of the great novelists have been voluminous creators, and none more so than Balzac and Dickens. One can be pretty sure that, if they had lived to old age, they would have gone on concocting story after story. One would think that, of all the gifts a novelist needs, invention on a large scale is the most essential. This gift Stendhal almost completely lacked. Yet he is, perhaps, the most original of novelists. Just as, when in his youth he wanted to become a famous dramatist, he could never think of an idea on which to construct a play; so, when it came to writing novels, it looks as though he was unable to evolve a plot out of his own head. His first novel, as I have said, was Armance. The Duchesse de Duras had written two novels which by their somewhat daring subjects had had a succès de scandale, and a writer of some note in his day, by name Henri de Latouche, wrote one, which he issued anonymously, hoping it would be ascribed to the Duchess, and of which the hero was impotent. I have not read it, and can speak of it only from hearsay. From this I gather that Stendhal for Armance took not only the theme, but also the plot
, of Latouche’s book. With what looks like brazen effrontery, he even gave his hero the same name as Latouche had given his, and it was only later that he changed it from Olivier to Octave. He embroidered upon the idea with what I suppose would be called psychological realism; but the novel remains a poor one: the incidents are wildly improbable, and for my part I find it impossible to believe that a man suffering from the peculiar disability which gives the book its theme could fall passionately in love with a young girl. In Le Rouge et le Noir, as I shall show later, Stendhal followed closely the story of a young man who was the subject of a celebrated trial. The only part of La Chartreuse de Parme which Sainte-Beuve saw fit to praise is the description of the Battle of Waterloo, and Stendhal’s description was suggested by the memoirs of an English soldier who had been at the Battle of Vittoria. For the rest of that particular book he depended on old Italian annals and memoirs. Now, a novelist obviously gets his plots from somewhere, sometimes from incidents in real life that he has experienced, witnessed or been told of, but as a rule, I should say, from an elaboration of characters who have for some reason excited his imagination. I know of no novelist of the first rank, other than Stendhal, who has so directly found his inspiration in what he has read. I do not remark on this in disparagement, but merely as a curious fact. Stendhal was not greatly inventive; but, how it came about none can tell, nature had endowed this vulgar buffoon with a wonderful gift of accurate observation, and with a piercing insight into the intricacies, vagaries and bizarreries of the human heart. He had a very poor opinion of his fellow-creatures, but was intensely interested in them. In his Mémoires d’un Touriste there is a revealing passage in which he relates how, on a journey through France, he took a post-chaise in order to admire the scenery at his leisure, but after a while, finding himself desperately bored, abandoned it for the crowded stagecoach where he could talk to his fellow-travellers and, at table d’hôte, listen to their stories.